Shazam Seeds Convergence With Funds; DNT Growing Pains

Audio fingerprinting app Shazam has raised $40 million in a funding round from Latin American wireless carrier Movil. Read the release. But the proceeds have little to do with mobile. Instead, Shazam, which connects users’ smartphones and tablets to information about ambient audio content for the purposes of “discovery,” is working on building its TV-related capabilities. “Shazam’s expansion into television has moved the company into an entirely new phase of growth with interactive advertising generating new sources of revenue and partnerships with broadcasters...,” said Shazam CEO Rich Riley.

DNT Growing Pains

As more Internet users send do-not-track requests, keeping up with the growing number of requests is quickly becoming too cumbersome for advertisers to handle, according to IAB general counsel Mike Zaneis. During a telephone meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium’s tracking-protection group last week, Zaneis noted, “We expect DNT:1 signals to approach 50% in the short term [and advertisers] no longer want to try to distinguish between what DNT:1 signals are legitimate and which are not.” A better approach, Zaneis argued, is to “deidentify” user data. It remains to be seen what deidentification would mean. Read the transcript.

Data Literacy

The privacy dialog between marketers and consumers might be a little less fraught if businesses do a better job of spreading “data literacy,” writes social-media strategist Ian Greenleigh in Digiday. “Data-literate consumers seek out the best return on their data,” he says, adding that consumers share more of it with businesses that win their trust. As a result, “businesses get data that’s more predictive, accurate, holistic and actionable than what could be captured without consumer participation.” Read the rest.

A Mobile Blind Spot

Mobile Commerce Daily surveys the data on mobile’s impact on email performance and finds retailers are falling down on the job. “There are few retailers who haven’t tried QR codes … or looked at making their Web site more mobile-friendly,” digital-marketing agency Knotice’s Dave Lawson tells Lauren Johnson. “There are many, however, who haven’t considered the implications of mobility on one of the most reliable performance channels for their business, which is email.” More.

Briefing Creative

In the development of a creative brief, it’s vital the process become a team effort among account, media and creative teams, argues Avi Dan, founder of marketing consultancy Avidan Strategies, in a column for Forbes. “The most important job of the account planner is to put together the creative brief. This document gives the creative team all the information they need to develop a campaign. But data is not enough. The brief needs to ignite the creative process. It often doesn’t.” Read more. OK, but what you gonna do about that data?

Choose Your Ads

PandoDaily covers a new video-advertising startup based in Israel called Carambola that raised $1 million in funding. Pando’s Erin Griffith explains the offering: “Carambola’s ad units are basically like games that aren’t completely annoying. In some ways they remind me of those pop-ups from the early 00′s that ask you whether a photo of George W. Bush or Britney Spears is the president. Only for a video.” Read more. Sounds like choose-your-own-adventure for video.